Call centers are used by many industries to provide information by voice communication to a large number of customers or other interested parties. Telemarketing companies, for example, use call centers to process both inbound and outbound calls, mostly concerning offers of goods and services, but also to provide other information for company clients. Banks and financial institutions also use call centers, as do manufacturing companies, travel companies (e.g., airlines, auto rental companies, etc.), and virtually any other business having the need to contact a large number of customers, or to provide a contact point for those customers.
A typical call center will have a front end with one or more voice response units (VRU), call switching equipment, an automatic call distributor (ACD), and several work stations having a telephone and computer terminal at which a live operator processes the call. A caller may interact with an interactive voice response (IVR or VRU) system to effectuate a commercial transaction. For example, the caller may be prompted to identify themselves, such as through entry of a customer number as it may appear on a mail order catalog or another customer identifier.
Disadvantageously, customer identification information may be obtained by a malicious entity that may then fraudulently access a user account. Identity theft is motivating institutions to employ new and sophisticated methods of authenticating their customers. This spans the marketplace from government, financial, healthcare, insurance, mobile service industries, and various other industries. However, contemporary systems provide no automated tools to help diagnose fraudulent interactive voice response usage.
Therefore, what is needed is a mechanism that overcomes the described problems and limitations.